Parallel U. - Sophomore Year

by Dakota Rusk

  I hadn’t taken the time to consider what that meant for me, for my future—whether I was free to love and be loved, or bound to my earlier commitment. That kind of self-examination had to wait until now—until I was actually put into a kind of dungeon and left there with no one to talk to but myself. And this was the subject that I couldn’t stop bringing up.

  Eventually I realized that Jocasta was right: I still owed Vesta what I’d promised her. I’d offered her my life; and I was still living.

  But I also realized that I didn’t want to honor my promise any longer.

  And Donald had done that to me.

  There was no resolving the problem; it careened back and forth in my head, like the volleys in a tennis match. Finally, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Eddie had been gone for five whole nights, and I’d grown bored out of my mind wandering the tunnels listlessly looking for I don’t even know what, and even Gerrid hadn’t paid one of this lightning-quick visits in a while.

  So I decided, enough of this lurking, this hiding, this cringing in a basement endlessly wallowing in my romantic woes. I was Fabia Terentia, a champion—the girl they called Warrior Nun—and I was a woman of action, not a thinker or a planner or an investigator. When I wanted to know something, I confronted it; I threw myself at it. I challenged it.

  And that’s how I found myself, on a very cold January night, standing outside Donald’s dormitory. I wore an old woolen cloak with a hood—it wasn’t mine, I’d found it in a closet in one of the tunnels, so I convinced myself it served as a disguise—and I kept to the shadows of a large evergreen hedge that bordered the walk. Snowflakes drifted lazily to the ground, as if they had all the time in the world to get there, and people ambled by with just about the same deliberation; it was a quiet, drowsy winter night, with a pale pink glow high in the sky.

  I knew which window was Donald’s; it was on the third floor, and it was lit. I watched it for a glimpse of him, while wondering what I’d do if I didn’t get it. Would I throw a pebble up at the pane, to get his attention? Or would I actually dare to enter the building, go up to his floor, and hope to catch sight of him there…?

  I was weighing these options—both stupid, both dangerous, both highly emotional and highly un-me—when to my astonishment, I heard myself summoned from down the walk.

  “Fabia?” someone cried. “Is—is that you?”

  I shouldn’t have turned my head—but before I realized this, I’d already done it.

  And found myself facing Ntombi.

  25

  I drew the cloak tighter around me, as though that might prevent her from confirming it was really me.

  But she was already sprinting over to me, arms wide and ready for an embrace. “They told us you weren’t coming back,” she said, enveloping me in a bear hug. “I knew it couldn’t be true—I knew you wouldn’t just leave forever without saying goodbye!”

  I was stunned at how badly I’d screwed up. I’d let loneliness and boredom make me reckless, and now I was paying the price. “How did you recognize me?” I asked.

  She stood back and looked at me as though I’d said something stupid. “Who else is this tall?”

  Another dumb oversight. I’d just presumed I could mask my identity by hiding my face and clothes. I never even considered my height.

  “How long are you back?” she asked, still clutching my arms like she was unwilling to let go of me. “Who else knows? Are you taking classes again, or are you going back to your family?”

  “That wasn’t exactly my family,” I said, wanting to stop her talking—or at least quiet her down.

  That did the trick. She looked confused for a few moments, then said, “What—what are you saying? That was some kind of trick?”

  “Yes, a deadly one. And it was played on me.”

  The intensity of Ntombi’s greeting had drawn some stares, and now her gasp of shock did likewise. I couldn’t risk anyone else recognizing me, so I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her behind the hedge.

  “No one can know I’m back,” I said in a hushed voice. “You can’t tell anybody. Please, Ntombi. This is serious.”

  She looked alarmed and frightened. “Fabia, you’re scaring me.”

  “You’d better be scared.” She looked suddenly panicked, and I softened. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come out tonight—I shouldn’t have let myself be seen. It isn’t safe. I don’t want to put anyone in danger, least of all you.”

  Through her fear, a glint of hurt pride shone through. “This is something to do with your other friends, isn’t it?...Your real friends.”

  “Yes, but they’re not—” Agh, she was being so exasperating! How did I get into this mess? “You’re my real friend too, Ntombi. Of course you are. But they’re better at dealing with dangerous business.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “I don’t; but it isn’t worth finding out. We’ve got this. Please trust me.”

  “Why? What ‘dangerous business’?” All at once she seemed to realize where she’d found me. “Are you here to see Donald? Is he involved? Am I the only one you don’t trust?”

  “No—he doesn’t know anything about this, and you can’t tell him. Ntombi—”

  Someone peered around the hedge and asked, “Is everything all right?”

  I was so startled, I almost reacted instinctively; I stopped myself in time, but the boy saw me almost strike out of him and backed away fast.

  “We’re fine, thanks, everything’s fine,” I said as he scurried away.

  I realized I’d only attract more attention the longer I stayed here; also, that I needed time to explain to Ntombi what was going on. “Come with me,” I said.

  I led her to the side of the dorm and down an exterior stairwell that led to the basement; it was how I’d come up, and I’d left the door propped slightly open so it wouldn’t lock shut behind me. When Ntombi and I passed through it, I let it do so now. No one would be following us.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, a little quaveringly as I led her through the low-ceilinged dimness.

  “It’s perfectly safe. We’re just going to the tunnels my friend Gerrid uses. I told you about that, didn’t I? Because he’s sensitive to light?”

  “Is he down here too?” she asked. I realized she’d never met him, and—like most people—was probably a little wary of doing so.

  “No, it’s just me.” The farther we went into the tunnels, the more she dragged her heels; if this kept up, I’d soon be dragging her like an oversized pull-toy. I didn’t want to force her to go where she didn’t want to.

  So I stopped and turned to face her. We were deep enough into the labyrinth—somewhere between the dorm and the Feynman Research Annex—that no one was likely to come across us. I looked at her; her beautiful, hazelnut-hued skin took on a sickly greenish cue in the inert, life-draining fluorescent light.

  “President Foxglove tried to have me killed,” I said.

  Her jaw fell open. “Fabia!” she gasped.

  “In fact, she probably still thinks she succeeded. Though she may have some suspicions…anyway, it’s incredibly important that she not know she failed. She’s up to something, and I’m trying to find out what.”

  “Do you have any ideas?” she asked.

  I frowned. I have an idea I’m a terrible detective, I wanted to say. That I’m lazy and self-involved and easily distracted. But I couldn’t say that; because I saw the way she was looking at me; it was the way Merri had once looked at me. She was frightened, and needed to believe in something…in someone. She wanted a hero. And I was all that was on hand.

  “Not yet,” I said. “My friend Eddie is supposed to be helping me, but—”

  “Eddie?” she said, interrupting me. “The boy with the Hopper?”

  “Yes—that’s how the witches have been going back and forth from Parallel 17. That’s how they took me to what I thought was my home parallel. Not by magic; they’ve been using Eddie’s Hopper.”

  “H
e let them?”

  “They forced him. Kidnapped him. They actually had him chained up.”

  “And you,” she Ntombi, her face glowing with pride. “You rescued him!”

  I blushed; and I was grateful for the draining blankness of the light because it meant she probably couldn’t see this. But having her put it that way made me realize that—yes, I had rescued him.

  “Let me help,” Ntombi said, suddenly full of urgency. “Please, Fabia—you don’t have to do this alone. I’m strong, you know I am; I’m quick and I’m brave. And I’m highly intelligent! You can’t just tell me all of this and then kick me back to the sidelines, expect me to go about my usual business, knowing there’s this epic battle being waged without me.”

  I was about to tell her how impossible that was when something literally made my nose twitch.

  “Do you smell something?” I asked.

  She sniffed the air, than made a sour face. “Oh. That’s awful. What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said as the aroma continued to foul the air around us. “I’d better go and check it out. Do you remember the way back up to the commons?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. If you’re looking into this, so am I!”

  I didn’t know if I had time to continue fighting her—and in fact I didn’t really want to. She was a grown woman, she’d made a choice; I would respect it. And the truth of it was, I liked the idea of not being alone any longer.

  But the closer we got to the stench—which seemed to be both animal and herbal in nature, acrid and rotten—the harder it was to endure. We had to cover our mouths with our shirtfronts, and even then it was difficult not to retch.

  And then we heard the chanting. It reached us first as a low, steady buzz, so that it might be the hum of any one of the furnaces or generators located down here. But soon we recognized its human origin, and its haunting, almost liturgical rhythm.

  At last we came upon a small nexus point where three branches of the tunnels converge; I estimated we were roughly beneath Asimov Residence Hall. From the concealment of the deepest shadow we could find, we peered into the middle of that nexus, where a gathering of more than a dozen people, all wearing long, hooded robes, stood in a circle and chanted. We couldn’t see what was in the middle of the circle; but whatever it was, it was burning.

  We watched, scarcely breathing, for what seemed a small lifetime, until the flames within the circle had died down and the chanting receded to barely a whisper—which was incredibly creepy to hear. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but whatever was being invoked here seemed unlikely to be comforting or pleasant.

  Finally one voice spoke out, clearly and unmistakably; I recognized the speaker immediately. Jocasta Foxglove.

  She spoke what sounded to me like the Celtic I’d heard on Parallel 17. And whatever she said, it seemed to stir some excitement in the other witches with her, who murmured in unison at certain points and swayed visibly on their feet.

  I counted them; eighteen in all. The exact number in the witches’ delegation. This must be the entire lot of them. I was relieved that there was no nineteenth—no shorter, plumper figure similarly bedecked. Whatever was going on here tonight, Rowella wasn’t part of it. I found myself fervently hoping she didn’t even know about it…because there was something about it, something vile and furtive, that made my skin crawl.

  Eventually they drifted away from the scene. Ntombi and I pressed our backs against the wall and hoped we weren’t seen; fortunately the hoods the witches wore blocked their peripheral vision, so that they passed us by without detecting our presence.

  When they’d gone, and we felt it was sufficiently safe to come quietly out and examine the scene, we found the burnt remnants of a small pyre set in the midst of some glyphs and symbols outlined on the floor in a black substance—probably blood, I realized later. And in the midst of the pyre sat the charred remains of a disemboweled cat.

  Well, I thought, there’s the answer to the mystery of where they’ve all been disappearing to.

  “What does it mean?” Ntombi asked, removing her shirttail from her face long enough to form the words.

  I shrugged. I didn’t have the faintest idea.

  We retreated the way we came; then I escorted Ntombi to the door that would lead her back up to the commons. We exchanged a hushed goodbye, and I told her not to contact me until I sent for her; revealingly, she no longer insisted that I recruit her to help in our campaign to undermine Jocasta. What she’d seen had apparently given her second thoughts.

  On my way back to what I now thought of as “headquarters,” I reflected on the phrases I’d heard the witches chanting, and tried to place where I’d heard them before. They were, I was increasingly certain, names. But whose? Yog Sothoth…Sub-Niggarath…Azathoth…

  I was perpetually on the point of remembering, then having it slip away; it was maddening. But the endeavor had one interesting side effect: when I lay down on my small cot that night and shut my eyes, for the first time in a long time, Donald wasn’t the image waiting for me.

  Unfortunately, the image that did appear behind my eyelids was something far less comforting. It was dark, and large, and quivering…and hissingly, obscenely alive.

  26

  “I don’t know what it is with you,” Dr. Bernstein said. “Your skull must be thicker than your muscles.”

  I felt a jolt of alarm; I knew he could be very derisive, but this was just flat-out insulting. I was embarrassed for whichever student he was talking to; but when I looked around the classroom I saw I was the only one seated there.

  “I tell you something vital,” he continued; “I tell you something pivotal. And what do you do? Get wrapped up in your navel-gazing, your self-pitying psychodrama, your adolescent mooning and galumphing about like some love-starved great Dane. Not a word sticks.” Suddenly he was close enough to lean right in and press the tip of his nose against mine. “Gorilla Girl! Vestal Virgin! Warrior Nun! You in there?” He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the top of my head; it sounded like a series of gunshots. “Hello? Anybody home? Wakey-wakey…” He shook me, and even though he was a small man with arms like twigs, I couldn’t pull free of him. “Warrior Nun…Warrior None…War, Ye Are None…”

  I gasped and opened my eyes.

  It had been Eddie shaking me; Eddie calling out to me. “Geez,” he said, “you sleep like a log. Anyone ever tell you that? Like a redwood. Thought I’d have to dynamite you awake.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “When did you get back? You were gone so long, I thought something must’ve gone wrong. Did you end up a prisoner again?”

  “Hm?” he asked. “Oh, you mean Parallel 39?...No, that went like a dream. They came, they went, never suspected a thing.” He scooted to the edge of the cot so I could swing my legs over the side.

  “Then where’ve you been ever since?” I asked, sitting upright and stretching out my back muscles; sleeping on that cot always left me sore all over.

  “Jumping around campus a bit,” he said. “Doing some creative hacking. Gotta hand it to these witches, though...they leave no digital trail. Even Jocasta Foxglove’s email account is handled by some junior staffer. And it’s all just scheduling stuff.”

  “They don’t trust electronics,” I said. I got to my feet and stretched my arms above my head; my fingertips grazed the low ceiling. “They don’t trust technology, period.”

  “Well, I wish I’d known that before. Could’a’ saved myself the trouble of banging my head against the wall for four days. What about you? Got anything?”

  I was about to say I hadn’t, when in a flash I remembered. “The witches were all down here last night. They ritually sacrificed and burned a cat.” I sniffed at my shirt sleeve. “The stink of it is still in my clothes.”

  “What?” he said, electrified. He jumped up to his feet and stared at me. “What was the point of it? What did she say?”

  “It was all in Celtic; we couldn’t understan
d a word.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “ ‘We’?”

  I felt my face burn. “My friend Ntombi and me.” He gave me a blank stare, as if I might be kidding him. “I’m sorry; I accidentally gave myself away. But she’s the only one who knows I’m back. Anyway, she was down here with me. We happened onto the last little bit of the ritual. It was all mumbo-jumbo. Except…”

  And suddenly, my dream version of Dr. Bernstein was back in my face, glowering at me. In an instant he’d faded, but just before he did, I put it all together.

  “Except what?” Eddie asked, nearly frantic. He actually pulled at the sides of his hair. “Fabia, come on! We’ve been at this for more than a week! I can’t take any freakin’ suspense!”

  “Azathoth,” I said. “She named Azathoth several times.”

  “What’s that? Sounds like a heavy metal band.”

  “I don’t recall all the details,” I said, striving to summon them from my memory of the previous term. “Dr. Bernstein mentioned him in his last Cosmology lecture. Big tentacled ancient god who lives out in space or something. He’s supposed to come back and initiate a reign of chaos.”

  Eddie snorted. “And when’s that supposed to happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Dr. Bernstein was a little short on details. I guess he was preoccupied with planning his suicide.”“Azathoth,” said Darius; “interesting. A primordial god who sits at the center of all existence. But that’s not the most interesting thing about him.”

  “I can hardly wait to hear what beats it,” said Eddie.

  Darius, Merri, and Gerrid had come down to headquarters after a text summons from Eddie. We were counting on Darius’s literally encyclopedic memory to fill in the blanks for us.

  “What’s most interesting about Azathoth,” he said, “is that he’s said to have created the universe—in fact every universe. Which he did by dreaming it into being. You, me, everything around us, everything in the whole cosmos—we’re just part of Azathoth’s dream. And when he wakes up, we vanish; only chaos is left.”